In late 2008, six thousand pounds of cow bones sat boxed in a Dutch warehouse. Marina Abramović, whose retrospective is on view at MoMA, had requested that we ship the bones, a major component of her installation Balkan Baroque, far in advance of the exhibition. We could not have anticipated that the next fifteen months would involve our learning about bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), incineration plants in New Jersey, the dearth of slaughterhouses in the western United States, or that a place called Skulls Unlimited existed. Read more

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